Ghost on the Wing
Fiction by Elias Squires
Summer Cloud, Apache Trail, Arizona by George Elbert Burr, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
The man walks the long stretch of road between the city and the bay every week like clockwork, canvas-wrapped feet scuffing heavy on the gravel highway shoulder. Back and forth, a new age pilgrim, eyes wide and staring at the roar of logging trucks barrelling through the wavering summer heat. Won’t take a ride or any food, just motions quiet for a cigarette or two, and wordless keeps on walking, puffing idly through the worn-soft afternoon.
The fill-up clerk tells you that’s the consequence of whistling in the woods, that old dogs only know the space between water and what’s called home. Tasteless joking for all that he is serious, that this is what grandmother always whispered after dark. He is trying to relearn a language stolen from a throat and she remembers the danger of being a child, knows that damage doesn’t need to make sense to keep you sane, keep you clinging tightly to what you can—even a ghost can hold the beating memory of a people in their grief.
Whitefish sizzles smoky on the fire, fresh-caught that afternoon. He scales it with his knife, handle in the shape of a bear, says he skinned one all himself last season and how he’d seen that man watching silent from the shoulder with eyes so sad like he’d never seen a dead thing before, blood running shaky down that sacred path, and how he didn’t know why but he’d said sorry in words still clumsy between his teeth.
Elias Squires is a queer, trans writer in his third year as a Creative Writing and Contemporary Studies student at Dalhousie University in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. He is a writer for the University of King's College's Watch Magazine, and was the third-place recipient of the Clare Murray Fooshee Fiction Prize in 2025.